Search for antimatter goes 4,850ft below ground

WASHINGTON: Scientists are building a 40kg germanium detector, 4,850 feet beneath the earth's surface in a laboratory in the US, to help explain the puzzling imbalance between matter and antimatter generated by the Big Bang.

The US department of energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has begun delivery of germanium-76 detectors to the underground laboratory in South Dakota with the intention of building the germanium detector, capable of detecting the theorised neutrinoless double beta decay.

The detection might help to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance. "It might explain why we're here at all. It could help explain why the matter that we are made of exists," said David Radford, who oversees specific ORNL activities in the majorana demonstrator research effort.

Radford, a researcher in ORNL's physics division and an expert in germanium detectors, has been delivering germanium-76 to Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota, for the project. After navigating a blizzard, Radford made a second delivery in March. Before the detection of the unobserved decay can begin, however, the germanium must first be processed, refined and enriched.